Glückwünsche Dynatrace on the Sale!

Big news today as Compuware acquires yet another competitor – Dynatrace for $256M in cash. I guess their mainframe business is quite the cash cow – especially after their acquisition of Gomez for $295M in cash - Yowza! – in late 2009.

Compuware has an application performance management deep dive product its called Application Vantage and has been recently rebranded as “Gomez Transaction Trace Analysis”. The App Vantage application performance management tool is very similar to Dynatrace’s flagship product in terms of the underlying technology – but Dynatrace really has succeeded in developing the “next generation” in this space.

The industry (including Gartner) has been bashing the Application Vantage product over the past few years so I guess Compuware got the message and pulled out the wad of mainframe license renewal cash to fix the problem. And good for them – Dynatrace has an excellent application performance management product that everyone is raving about for application deep dive.

Props to Dynatrace for being able to succeed so well with a Gorilla like Wily (owned by CA) in the house – who already had 1000 customers when Dynatrace hit the market. That is no easy feat since Wily was also considered the industry leader in the specific space that Dynatrace was targeting – Gute Arbeit! (The German is related to Dynatrace’s Austrian roots – for those who were not aware)

More Recent Application Performance Management Acquisitions

Another recent acquisition in this space was back in April; BMC bought Coradiant. BMC ALSO already had a similar competing product which was being bashed on by Gartner. Once again – digging into the deep mainframe license renewal pockets – they bought the leading product in the space.

And that’s not all! Yet another $350M acquisition last year was CA buying Nimsoft – once again – Nimsoft had a number of competing products – amazing.

This is a serious lesson for the guys making purchasing decisions at the big companies. The existing products that these big guys already have are ones that were also brought in through acquisition. Has the enterprise monitoring market matured so much that companies are re-buying technologies with similar capabilities to ones they already have?

Whose the next acquisition in the application performance management space? Speculations?

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